Forget to Remember is the thesis project of Heather Fulton. Consisting of five locations in Toronto, each commemorated by posters constructed of materials that cannot withstand the effects of weather and the passage of time. The project examines the ties between memory, ephemera, and cityscape.

     "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" is a latin phrase that translates to "thus passes the glory of the world", and a mantra that has influenced the undertone of this project. This project began in September of 2011 with the idea of contrasting the themes of memory and ephemera.

The term "ephemera" encapsulates fragments of our environment that are produced without the intention of permanence. Flyers hastily taped to telephone polls, outdated maps in which roads since demolished appear, ticket stubs, and scrawled notes found in library books . These are all ephemeral in their nature. Flyers are lost to the test of weather and removal, road maps lose function, ticket stubs crumble as the venues they feature are torn down, and notes scrawled fade into the paper as the library book becomes dog-eared and spine-broken.

Memory, both personal and collective, is subject to the same fleeting and transitory qualities as ephemera. Memory fades, forgets, rewrites and reworks itself- a target of its own ephemeral nature. This is illustrated by Florence King, who writes: 

"True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories"

The third piece of this project is cityscape. Urban life is ephemeral in itself. Our landscape changes everyday by building new memories and forgetting old ones. This happens on small and large scales from the renaming of a park to the loss of a monument. Backed by extensive research on the study of memory, ephemera, and landscape, Forget to Remember examines five of Toronto's lost buildings and the legacies they left behind.